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Drawn from a case study of a public library in a large urban area, this chapter offers insights into the lives of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer/questioning (LGBTQ+) youth experiencing homelessness and the potential intersection of public libraries and their lives. To gain insight, the author conducted one focus group with five youth, as well as 22 one-on-one interviews with public librarians, service providers who work with the youth, and the young people themselves. The chapter offers specific examples of the challenges the youth face on the streets, as well as concrete steps libraries can take to address these challenges. These findings and strategies will help public librarians and those who support public libraries to understand and take action to address the ongoing needs of a group that falls outside what libraries may consider typical service expectations.

Libraries must acknowledge their role as gatekeepers for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, gender expansive queer and questioning (LGBTGEQ+) young people on their journey to home. By exploring the intersections of community, identity, accessible information, equitable practices, and leadership commitment, this chapter calls on the profession to lean in and no longer look away (K. Strowder, personal communication, 2022).

This article aims to describe methodological issues in relation to the definition of homelessness and the drawing of samples of young homeless people in four European countries. The purposes of the research project were, first, to make a comparison of different homeless situations facing young people in these four countries, and second, to introduce early intervention and action planning methodologies developed in the UK and The Netherlands to other countries in the study – Portugal (a family welfare society) and the Czech Republic (an ex‐communist regime redeveloping its welfare policies).

After extensive discussions and key worker interviews with local agencies, 54 homeless young people were interviewed in each country. Each sample was intended to be purposive in that it should recruit homeless young men and women from those born in that country from the dominant (white) ethnic group, born in that country from minority ethnic groups, and young people not born in that country. A major issue was how to define homelessness in order to be able to recruit across the spectrum of homeless youth.

The purposive samples recruited in the four countries reflected the availability of services in those countries and levels of family support. Whilst young homeless people in The Netherlands and the UK were mostly living in supported housing, in Portugal they were living as “hidden homeless” and in the Czech Republic on the streets or in squats.

The methodological difficulties encountered during the project are themselves a useful lesson learnt, for the creation of trans‐national understanding and politicy.

Nevertheless, despite the very different circumstances of limited services in Portugal and the Czech Republic, it appeared that both early intervention methods and key working approaches could be applied broadly across the EU.

Transnational studies of youth homelessness are rare and therefore produce particularly useful insights for research, policy and practice.

This chapter examines the educational barriers that homeless youth face in one large urban area. The text reviews the McKinney–Vento Homeless Assistance Act and discusses how California has attempted to follow the federal mandates, and the implications for Los Angeles. The chapter utilizes interviews with 120 homeless youth and 45 policymakers, school counselors, and after-school program coordinators in Los Angeles to understand how youth experience the education system. The authors identify aspects of the federal mandate that impede the educational progress of homeless youth. The findings highlight that homeless youth are not a homogenous group and educational supports need to be designed recognizing the diversity of their needs. Implications for policy and program implementation are discussed as they pertain to one large city in order to generate future research that might support, contradict, or expand upon the findings.

Youth homelessness has been recognised as a significant social problem since the late 1980s, and local authority homelessness strategies now include preventative services as a key area of development. However, youth homelessness prevention services are a relatively recent innovation in the UK, and there is only a small literature on their effectiveness. Safe Moves, developed by the Foyer Federation and Connexions during 2002‐2004, represents the first national youth prevention model and offers young people support with life skills, peer mentoring and family mediation. An independent evaluation by the Centre for Housing Policy, University of York concluded that Safe Moves was preventing homelessness for some young people, although the challenges of establishing projects in a predominantly crisis‐orientated culture were significant.

In recent years the political and practice climates have changed greatly, towards a focus on preventing negative experiences and vulnerability in the lives of children and young people, but at present many efforts suffer from two defects: they apply adult treatment ideas to young people, and they are not joined‐up responses. The article argues that young people are different from adults, having not yet established set patterns of behaviour, and that this offers a chance to intervene before the point of crisis. While they may misuse drugs and alcohol, in the main this is symptomatic of other problems that they need our support to face, which can be offered most effectively by services that are holistic and integrated, and which deal first with their emotional and family needs while also addressing personal development and vocational skills and training. These interventions need to begin well before the current housing crisis points around age 16 or 17.

There is a growing recognition that participation in ‘shadow’ structures such as youth councils, forums and parliaments does not meet all of young people’s needs for action and engagement, and a growing emphasis on finding and recognising opportunities for young people to move out of these structures and initiate their own forms of democratic action for change. This chapter, co-written by academics and young researchers recruited from a youth council, tells the story of an action research project set up under the auspices of PARTISPACE which aimed to learn about the dynamics of self-initiated and autonomous youth participation beyond the confines of formalised youth participation structures. In this chapter, the authors explain what we all brought to the project, reflect from different perspectives on the process we went through, the challenges we encountered, the outcomes we achieved, and make sense of what we, collectively and individually, learned from the experience about different processes of participation.

Due to ongoing inequities in the social determinants of health and systemic barriers, homelessness continues to be a significant concern that disproportionately impacts racialized communities. Despite constituting a small proportion of the population, Black individuals are over-represented among people experiencing homelessness in many Canadian cities. However, although Black homelessness in Canada is a pressing issue, it has received limited attention in the academic literature. The purpose of this paper is to examine the reported prevalence of Black homelessness across Canada.

By consulting enumerations from 61 designated communities that participated in the 2018 Nationally Coordinated Point-in-Time Count and two regional repositories – one for homeless counts supported by the government of British Columbia and another from the Rural Development Network – this paper reports on the scale and scope of Black homelessness across Canada.

Significantly, these reports demonstrate that Black people are over-represented among those experiencing homelessness compared to local and national populations. These enumerations also demonstrate significant gaps in the reporting of Black homelessness and inadequate nuance in data collection methods, which limit the ability of respondents to describe their identity beyond “Black.”

This research provides an unprecedented examination of Black homelessness across Canada and concludes with recommendations to expand knowledge on this important and under-researched issue, provide suggestions for future iterations of homeless enumerations and facilitate the development of inclusive housing policy.

Purpose – There are many unknowns about the obstacles as well as the resilient characteristics that vulnerable youth possess as they engage in the transition to adulthood. This chapter seeks to address some of these unknowns.

Methodology/approach – This chapter is based on qualitative interviews with 60 youths residing in a homeless shelter and follow-up interviews with 39 of these youths after they left the shelter.

Findings – This chapter presents the difficult life histories of these youths and how these histories affect their ability to successfully transition into adulthood. Youths reported elevated levels of instability, most often due to physical, emotional, and sexual abuse, as well as parental drug abuse, poverty, and transience. From these experiences, youths learned to rely only on themselves for support and believe resiliently in their own ability to achieve their goals. However, when located after they had left the shelter, many were still struggling mightily to achieve these goals. Post shelter, the most stable group of participants was women with children and many young mothers spoke evocatively about the support and motivation given to them by their children.

Research limitations/implication – This chapter is limited by its small, nonrandom sample. Future research on the transition to adulthood would benefit from analyzing the transition for youths with diverse backgrounds and experiences.

Originality/value of paper – The sample population and the use of qualitative, longitudinal data make this paper an important contribution to the broader transition to adulthood literature as well as the growing sociological literature on homeless youth.

In the context of what may be understood as an ‘emotional retreat’ in homelessness research and service provision (Chamberlayne, 2004, p. 347), this chapter canvasses the valuable role of qualitative research in continuing to diversify understandings and evidences of homelessness made available across the field. I work to make sense of the ways, in which the emotional and physical messiness of ‘in situ’ research (Malins, Fitzgerald, & Threadgold, 2006, p. 514) can give rise to new understandings of homelessness that both intervene in and compliment existing research and policy knowledges. While my key focus here will be on the difficult task of actually articulating how it is that particular forms of qualitative research knowledge may provide epistemological leverage to the field of homelessness, it should also be clear that the impetus for this chapter, and indeed for my broader research engagement in homelessness (see for example, Robinson 2002b, 2003, 2005) stems from my concern with the ways in which felt-experience is particularly backgrounded in this field. As I have discussed elsewhere, the ramifications of making relatively silent corporeal and emotional dimensions of homelessness have troublingly included the entrenchment of conceptualisations of, and responses to, homelessness that cannot account for the multidimensional ways in which trajectories of homelessness can unfold and become reinforced. In particular, my focus has been on the ways in which the lack of attention paid within social research to the bodily impacts of cumulative trauma and grief in the lives of homeless people, has in turn been mirrored in the limited framing of social policy and welfare service delivery.